Although the system of the invention has many applications, including, but not limited to motor vehicle identification, railroad car identification, inventory control, security systems, locating and tracking vehicles, monitoring from inaccessible locations, downed aircraft location, battlefield monitoring, and environmental monitoring, the preferred embodiment was developed for biomedical monitoring and in particular for identifying the health of selected animals. It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that many methods of identifying animals are practiced by those in the livestock industry. However, none of these prior art methods are universally effective or utilized because of various shortcomings in each of such systems. Exemplary of those shortcomings are loss of the identification carried by the animal, poor visibility of the animal, and human errors in reading or transcribing.
There has been an existing need in the agricultural industry to identify particular animals and to determine, for example, the temperature of the animal as an indication of its health. It would be preferable that an animal monitoring system be amenable to automation and compatible with computer data processing methods so that much information on many animals can be more easily and errorlessly processed than has been possible with prior art systems. The system of the invention can be used to facilitate detailed records on such things as pedigree, food intake, fertility, preventative medical care, resistance to a disease, response to treatment, costs, sales, show performance and livestock movement. For food animals the invention can provide information from which one can compute conversion efficiency and relate management practices to carcass properties. The system of the invention has use in herd improvement for processing and determining relevant information from more factors than it is presently economical to consider.
In addition, the remote monitoring afforded by practicing the invention eliminates excess animal handling by humans and the attendant risk to personnel and animal. The system also eliminates the stress-induced temperature increase frequently associated with handling animals.